Shotgun

Shotgun is a firearm that is usually designed to be fired from the shoulder, which uses the energy of a fixed shell to fire a number of small spherical pellets called shot or a solid projectile called a slug. Most shotguns are chambered for 12 gauge buckshot shells.

Contents

Overview

Shotguns are very deadly in close range. Upon pulling the trigger, several pellets are fired in a spread pattern. A few shotguns can use slugs which are solid projectiles for long range shooting.

Most of the shotguns that released in CrossFire are semi-automatic, but some of them are pump-action or break-action and are generally more powerful as well as more stable & accurate than the semi-automatic shotguns.

Performance

Shotguns produce massive damage when fired at close range as it can instantly score a kill if all the pellets hit the target, however their effectiveness is almost completely reduced when fired at long range. Shotguns can hit targets without needing pinpoint accuracy due to their pellet spread, but centered shots still deal the most damage. Shotguns in general tend to be fairly light in weight, so it is possible to strafe and dodge incoming bullets.

All shotguns in CF vary in shell pellet spread: most shotguns have their pellets spread out widely at medium range, resulting in low damage at those distances. Other shotguns retain a tight pattern at medium range, resulting in more pellets hitting the target (and therefore more damage).

One of the worst drawbacks of shotguns is that the full reload usually takes agonizingly long, perhaps the second longest reload in the game. This will leave you vulnerable to attack, therefore reloading in the middle of combat is highly not recommended. To compensate this, most pump-action shotguns that requires manual reload allow players to do reload cancel and fire immediately, although some are slower than others due to the extra pumping animation. Semi-automatic shotguns have shorter reload time, at the cost of unable to fire until the reload is finished.

Shotgun Slugs

A few shotgun variants can use powerful slug shells that can kill in one shot up to long range, but they need time to swap from buckshot shells to a single slug shell or vice-versa. It is because the slug is a single projectile (like a rifle bullet), pinpoint accuracy is needed. After shooting a loaded slug, the player has to swap another fresh slug shell again.

The grey one is exclusive for AA-12 Buster in its charged form (Buster Shot).

The slug shells portrayed in CrossFire are colored in green, where as in reality, green slug shells are commonly well-known made by Remington.

Indonesian players are starting to ban shotguns (sometimes machine guns as well) from entering S&D rooms, especially in maps with a lot of corners (such as Castle and Mexico) since the Serbu Super-Shorty had been released. This is because the tendency of the shotguns to 1-hit kill opponents at close range is very high in CQB between corners, making shotguns over-powered.

Shotgun is the only weapon class (excluding throwing weapons) that hasn't received a VVIP variant. This frustrated many players as they find it stupid to get new shotguns every now and then, yet Tencent seems to have no intention of making VVIP one.

A common and overused reason for this is the OPed nature of VVIP weapons that could disrupt gameplay balance - this is heavily negated by the fact that lots of rifles / SMGs / Sniper Rifles are getting heavily buffed with VVIP effects, leaving the Shotgun class underwhelmed a lot.

Tencent has actually released a VVIP variant of AA-12 on the mobile version of CrossFire, however.

Unlike other Pump Action, A-Bolt Shotgun is the only shotgun that make as Bolt Action.